Olga's Gallery

George Grosz

(1893-1959)

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Georg Ehrenfried Gross was born on 26 July 1893 in Berlin into the family
of Karl Ehrenfried Gross, an innkeeper, and his wife Marie Wilhelmine Luise.
When the boy was only seven years old his father died. Together with his
mother he lived alternately in Berlin and Stolp in Pomerania, where Georg
started secondary school in 1902. In 1908 he was expelled from school for
having returned a trainee teacher's blow.

After passing the entrance exam he began his studies at the Royal Academy
of Art in Dresden. While in the Academy he specialized in graphic art and
started to co-operate with satirical magazines as early as 1910. In 1912
Grosz (then Gross) joined the graphic art course at the College of Arts
and Crafts in Berlin. In 1913 he spent several months in Paris at Colarossi's
studio. The main subjects of his drawings of the period are crimes and
orgies, erotic subjects; his cartoons find publication in "Ulk",
"Lustige Blätter" and other periodicals. He also did his first
book illustrations and began painting in oils.

With the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered, but was discharged
from the army several months later following a surgical operation. During
this period in Berlin Gross met various authors, artists and intellectuals,
among them those with whom he would found the Berlin Dada in 1917.

In 1916 the artist in protest against nationalism and patriotism altered
his name to George Grosz. The same year he painted the earliest of his
oils known, among them Lovesick
and Suicide and a year later he
published his first two albums, the "Erste George Grosz Mappe" and
"Kleine Grosz Mappe".

Following the revolution in Russia, an artists' association, the "November
Group" was established in Berlin in 1918, and Grosz joined it, soon after
becoming a member of the Communist Party. In 1919, with the publisher Wieland
Herzfelde (of Malik Publishing House), he started a magazine called "Die
Pleite", and collaborated with Franz Jung on "Jedermann sein eigener
Fussball" (Everybody his own football) and with John Hoexter and Carl
Einstein on "Der blutige Ernst" (The bloody seriousness). His drawings,
tartly critical of bourgeois society, appeared in various Malik publications;
the artist also produced portfolios and books, which regularly aroused
scandals.

In 1921 his album "Gott mit uns" (God with us) brought Grosz
charges of defaming the Reichswehr (army); in 1924 he was prosecuted for
offences against public morality by his album "Ecce
Homo" (the album was confiscated as being pornographic); in
1928 for his drawing "Shut up and keep serving the cause"
he was accused of blasphemy. All these scandals only helped consolidate
his fame.

In 1924 the artist became chairman of the artists' association "Rote
Gruppe" (Red Group); until 1927 he was a regular contributor to Communist
publications. In 1928 he was co-founder of the "Association Revolutionärer
Bildender Künstler Deutschlands" (German Association of Revolutionary
Artists).

Grosz's works of the 1920s were influenced by a complicated political
and economical situation in the post-war Germany and Europe and in one
sentence can be characterized as political and social satire. He himself
wrote about that time: "Everywhere, hymns of hatred were struck up. Everyone
was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the Junkers, the Communists, the
army, the property owners, the workers, the unemployed, the black Reichwehr,
the control commissions, the politicians, the department stores, and the
Jews again. It was an orgy of incitement, and the republic itself was a
weak thing, scarcely perceptible. … It was a completely negative world,
topped with colorful froth that many imagined to be true, happy Germany
before the onset of the new barbarism." p 53

In 1932, invited to lecture to the Arts Student League in NY, Grosz
visited the USA, and the following year emigrated there together with his
wife and two sons. In the USA he resumed teaching with the Art Students
League in NY. In the USA both his works and behavior changed radically
– no more attacks on society, the artist's commitment to the class struggle
was gone. This resignation was not sincere; in his autobiography, "Ein
kleiness Ja und ein Grosses Nein" (A Small Yes and a Big No), Grosz
later wrote: "My motto was now to give offence to none and be pleasing
to all. Assimilation is straightforward once one overcomes the greatly
overvalued superstition concerning character. To have character generally
means that one is distinctly inflexible, not necessarily for reasons of
age. Anyone who plans to get ahead and make money would do well to have
no character at all. The second rule for fitting in is to think everything
beautiful! Everything – that is to say, including things that are not beautiful
in reality."
Only once he lost control, when he learnt about the death of a friend
in a concentration camp. He published anti-fascist album "Interregnum",
which was not a success, moreover met criticism, since Americans did not
see any danger in fascism at the time and the artist's pictures seemed
an absurd exaggeration.

Grosz taught at the Art Students League till 1936. He also had a private
art school, his students were mainly society ladies. From 1937 to 1939
he was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled him to devote
time to his own work. He was not rich, but he got by comfortably. In 1938
Grosz was stripped of his German citizenship, numerous of his works
were burnt by the Nazis.

On the whole Grosz's artistic works during his American period are not
very interesting. Of more importance maybe his teaching activities and
the autobiography "A Little Yes and Big No" published in 1946. In 1954
Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1958
to the Academy of Fine Arts of Germany. His last works in America were
collages, which partly recall his Dada period and partly were influenced
by Pop Art.

In 1959 Grosz returned to Berlin for good, and only a month later he
died there, in his house.